Month: January 2009

Maciek Adwent, in a major post The Great Something-for-Nothing Double Bubble , makes a number of really good points. I want to focus on a single one of them, for now. First, he sums up the great Bush era doctrine of the Management Society, and why it was inevitable that it would fail. The something for nothing double bubble, in retrospect, should have been obvious. It’s the best summary of that era. Bravo. Then he hits upon a decisively global theme: the beginning of the argument and the conclusion of it follow: Management Society thinking is predicated on the idea that your job is always going obsolete and that the inevitable outcome of any career path is to start at[…]

Jim Novo wrote: Very few folks on the web actually do what built the newspaper business in the first place – investigative reporting, the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all for a newspaper to be in the “pass through” news business, that’s a commodity, as you pointed out. So it seems to me the right move is to let the web deal with the commodity news business (and the commodity ad space that goes with it) and take the newspaper upstream, where it’s not about quantity of subscriptions, it’s about quality of subscriptions, and the associated premium ad space. In other words, newspapers should move somewhere closer to a magazine. If investigative reporting[…]

Hamel, over at Dave Hamel 3.0, made an interesting point. The notion of an open source web analytics / business intelligence package is alluring. Three reasons: The first is standards. While the WAA is making good progress in defining standards, and the vendors are starting to make some progress towards adopting those standards, I think we’re a long ways away from calling apple an apple and the apple being an apple. And not a Banapple. The second is fault tolerance. Much of the existing codebase and tagging technology in web analytics is highly fault intolerant. Open source code, by way of repeated cleansing and improvement, would become less fault intolerant. In fact, if recent discourse around analytics has taught us[…]

There’s a lot of really great research out there, done by academics, on topics of direct interest to web analysts. Sadly, they’re all behind a wall. So, we’re reaching around that wall, seeing what’s relevant, and later, writing an easy to digest review. If members of the WAA are interested, they can read more. Original research is great, and I think the WAA does a great deal of it. Some of this secondary research is fairly interesting too. Jane An and Jennifer Day have each written a great reviews – which are forthcoming and timely. The aim is to provide value for members of the WAA, get some research out there, and really bridge that gap between academics and practitioners.[…]

Tuesday Odds and Ends – any of which might be good Tweet fodder: 1. My team and I are doing the technical Omniture training this week. Jason, our trainer, is awesome. The technical know-how for implementation of Omniture – to really get the most out of it, is most certainly not as simple as “just dump the f—-ing tags in”. The training reinforces the need KPI’s, business requirements, technical documentation, solid standards, and proper QA. I’m very happy that I know javascript and how to program. Poorly. 2. I finally got my “Programming in Objective-C 2.0” book. Awesome! 3. It dawned on me that it takes 12 hour work days to stay ahead of the industry. It does get easier[…]

It’s time for another Web Analytics Wednesday, this January 28th. Patrick Glinski has really gone all out this time, lining up sponsors from Omniture and ExactTarget, and hauling none other than Jim Sterne, founder and chairman of the Web Analytics Association, on out. For the first time, we’re going to have a panel. I’m excited because it marks a slight maturation in WAW, which I think will be welcomed. At the same time, Patrick nor myself want to lose the essential ethos of WAW, which involves getting together, sharing pain points and editorials, and laughing alot. There are multiple conversations that happen at multiple tables, people network, and then the table of regular regulars starts to consolidate around 10pm. Good[…]

Newspapers everywhere are dying. It’s no real surprise. Most newspapers don’t really contain much news. If the central function of a newspaper is to take information from the AP Newswire, sprinkle in five or six paragraphs of what counts as ‘local news’, then convince businesses to trade paper space for money, and mash it together – a day late – then they’re doing a great job. I don’t think it’s a winning formula. These days, the people who consume news get it increasingly from the web. There happen to be newspapers that have websites (speaking on behalf of Canada – poorly designed ones. The New York Times continues to be a great website). If you’re after commodified international news, you[…]

Proposal for a general formula for a summary report: Summary statement, good news good news, good news. Figures explaining good news. Recommendation for improvement. Summary statement room for improvement, bad news, figures explaining bad news, recommendation to improve. Expand upon recommendation. Follow up statement. Briefer summary statement, repeat good news. What do you think? Win?